ENGLISH73N

Comedy and Social Critique Comedy has been used to shine a no-holds-barred light on everything from the rise of fascism to the inanities of fashion. Over the decades, it has generated a number of questions. Some of these are ethical. What can we legitimately find funny or make fun of? Are there things we shouldn't laugh at? Can and should comedy be delimited or censored? When does comedy become abuse? When does it become hate speech? Some of the questions we will consider are more general: does comedy change through history? Is it culturally specific? Is it gender-specific? Is there a point at which these specifities give way to the possibility of a form of humor common to us all and the role laughter plays across human cultures. Finally, we will explore the expressive forms of comedy, including parody, satire, slapstick, tragi-comedy, the comics, stand-up, and physical comedy which raises the question of whether comedy can be said to reside in the body. The course may include the novels and short fiction of Mark Twain, Flannery O¿Connor, Philip Roth, Jane Smiley, Jonathan Lethem, David Grossman, and James McBride. Films may include Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, and Mel Brooks's, The Producers. Comedians whose work we may consider include Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Michelle Wolf, Wanda Sykes, Louis CK, Dave Chappelle, Sarah Silverman, Stephen Colbert, Larry David, Ramy Youssef, Phoebe Waller Bridge, and Sacha Baron Cohen. We will be reading the theorist M. M. Bakhtin's idea of carnival and of the centrality of laughter in the novel. We'll look at the controversy launched by the journalist Christopher Hitchens about women and humor and the responses his articles elicited, and arguments for and against censorship in public speech, including comedy. Finally, we'll consider the role of comedy in the era of digital media in the essays and interviews included in Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman's anthrology A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar.